What will 2015 Mean for Higher Education?

When the current Education for All (EFA) goals expire in 2015, the pendulum of global funding for education may swing in the direction of higher education. The EFA movement—supported for over a decade by more than 160 countries and coordinated by UNESCO—has a lofty goal to “provide quality basic education for all children, youths and adults by 2015.” EFA is aligned with the educational components of the Millennium Development Goals, which include universal primary education and gender parity and empowerment of women. Higher education has not been a target of these development goals.

As the world prepares to take stock of 15 years of investment to reach universal primary education and global poverty reduction, the international community is also beginning to discuss which set of challenges will need to be addressed over the next 15 years. Given the finite resources for education, debates on educational investment reflect a profoundly difficult choice for governments and international organizations: prioritizing funding to reach universal primary education or increasing access to secondary and tertiary education? The EFA framework for 2000-2015 was committed to universal primary education—but how likely is it that the next set of EFA goals will support secondary and tertiary education?

Quite likely it seems—if developing countries have a say. The goal of attaining universal primary education benefited many countries in the global South, with global enrollments in primary schools rising over the last decade. But this decade is shaping up as a decade of higher education, with emerging economies increasingly investing in higher education and skilled training. A notable example is Brazil’s Scientific Mobility Program, which was launched in 2011 with the goal of sending 100,000 Brazilian college students to study in science, engineering, technology and mathematics (STEM) fields around the world (and return home as experts to contribute as scholars and practitioners to Brazil’s booming economy). Brazil continues to support basic education initiatives, but this $2 billion national investment in international higher education signals a shift in educational investment priorities.